Claudia Paparella, a third-year PhD student in the Mediterranean Archaeology Collaborative Specialization Program (MACS), recently contributed a blog post to Peopling the Past, a digital humanities project run by archaeologists and ancient historians specializing in the cultures of the ancient Mediterranean. Peopling the Past is dedicated to teaching and learning about real people in the ancient world and the real people who study them. The project is produced by Carolyn M. Lafèrriere, Assistant Curator of Ancient Mediterranean Art at the Princeton University Art Museum, and Chelsea A.M. Garden, Associate Professor of Ancient History at Acadia University.
Claudia’s post, titled “Blog #89: Beyond Rome: The Indigenous People of Ancient Italy,” is part of Unknown Peoples, an ongoing series featuring researchers who investigate understudied and/or marginalized peoples in the past.
She discusses her research on the social history of indigenous Italian languages and their entanglement with Roman imperial expansion in Italy. Through an analysis of archaeological and epigraphic remains, Claudia challenges the overstated significance of Rome and advocates for the restoration of Italian indigenous agency in understanding the social, cultural, and economic changes occurring within Italian societies.
Claudia has won numerous awards in support and recognition of her research, including the Graduate Student Presentation Prize for best paper presented by a graduate student at the Annual Meeting of the Classical Association of Canada. In her award-winning paper, "Speaking Objects, Artisans, and Romanization: The Evolution and Social Context of Artisan Signatures in 7th/2nd century Italy," Claudia analyzed a collection of previously unexplored artisan signatures from the Italian peninsula between the 7th and the 2nd century BCE. She was also profiled in an article on A&S News this summer.